The Seven Myths of Gun Control

by Richard Poe
January 17, 2000

Does the press have an anti-gun
bias?

Yes,
says Brent Bozell, chairman of the Media Research Center. A study by
the Center found that television news stories calling for stricter gun
laws outnumbered newscasts opposing such laws by a ratio of 10 to 1. In
other words, we are hearing only one side of the story. No wonder so
few Americans are equipped to debate the issue of guns intelligently.

"Where the press is free, and every man
able to read, all is safe," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1816. But when
the press aligns itself with special interests - such as the anti-gun
lobby - critical information is censored, and liberty itself hangs in
the balance. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free ... it
expects what never was and never will be ..." warned Jefferson.

Ignorance about guns and gun rights has
reached pandemic proportions. Children are not taught the history or
meaning of the Second Amendment in school, nor do they learn later as
adults. Most of what Americans think they know about guns is false. The
anti-gun hysteria now sweeping our nation draws on several deeply
erroneous assumptions. I call them the Seven Myths of Gun Control. They
are:

Myth #1 — Guns
increase violent crime.

Just
the opposite is true. Experts have found that criminals tend to avoid
physical confrontation, when they fear their victims may be armed. But
when strict gun laws are imposed, criminals become bolder and more
violent, confident that their victims are defenseless.

Australians learned this lesson the hard
way. When a madman slaughtered 35 people at a Tasmanian resort in 1996,
the government responded by banning most firearms. More than 640,000
guns were seized from law-abiding citizens.

The result was a sharp increase in violent
crime. In the two years following the gun ban, armed robberies rose by
73 percent, unarmed robberies by 28 percent, kidnappings by 38 percent,
assaults by 17 percent and manslaughter by 29 percent, according to the
Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The
same thing happened in England. The government cracked down on guns
following a 1996 massacre of schoolchildren in Scotland. A terrifying
crime wave ensued. The U.S. Department of Justice announced, in 1998,
that the rate of muggings in England had surpassed that in the U.S. by
40 percent. Assault and burglary rates were found to be almost 100
percent higher in England than in the United States.

In his book More Guns, Less Crime, Yale Law
School economist John R. Lott points out that most criminals, in
America, choose empty houses to burglarize. They avoid late-night
break-ins, because, as many convicts have explained to researchers,
"that's the way to get shot." Hot burglaries - in which the criminal
enters while people are home - account for only 13 percent of all U.S.
burglaries.

But in
countries with strict gun control, such as England and Canada,
criminals enter houses at will, without worrying whether anyone is
home. The hot burglary rate in those countries is nearly 50 percent.

After studying 18 years' worth of crime
statistics from around the United States, Lott concluded that "states
experiencing the greatest reductions in crime are also the ones with
the fastest growing percentages of gun ownership."

On average, Lott found that violent crime
dropped by 4 percent for each 1 percent increase in gun ownership. The
most dramatic improvement came in states that allowed citizens to carry
concealed handguns. States enacting such laws between 1977 and 1994
experienced an average 10 percent reduction in murders and a 4.4
percent drop in overall violent crime during that period.

Myth #2 — Pulling a gun on a criminal
endangers you more than the criminal.

Gun bashers claim that if you draw a gun
during a mugging, the mugger will probably take it away from you. But
the facts say otherwise. According to surveys by Gallup, the Los
Angeles Times and other national polling organizations, Americans use
guns to defend themselves between 760,000 and 3.6 million times each
year. In 98 percent of those cases, simply brandishing the gun was
enough to scare off the attacker.

Myth
#3 — Guns pose a special threat to children.

Gun haters argue that firearms pose a unique
danger to children. But statistics do not support this claim. Only 200
children - aged 14 and younger - died from gun accidents in 1995. That
same year, 2,900 children died in car crashes, 950 drowned and 1,000
died of burns. "More children die in bicycle accidents each year than
die from all types of firearm accidents," Lott observes. Yet, there is
no national outcry to bar children from using bicycles.

Myth #4 — The Second Amendment applies only
to militiamen.

Gun
prohibitionists argue that the Second Amendment confers a right to bear
arms only on duly enrolled members of a state militia. But that is not
what the document says. It specifically grants the right to keep and
bear arms to "the people".

"The
phrase `the people' meant the same thing in the Second Amendment as it
did in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments — that is, each
and every free person," writes constitutional scholar Stephen Halbrook
in his book That Every Man Be Armed.

Even
Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe - a gun-control advocate known for
his liberal views - admitted, in the 1999 edition of his book American
Constitutional Law, that the Second Amendment confers an individual
right on U.S. citizens to "possess and use firearms in the defense of
themselves and their homes."

Myth
#5 — The Second Amendment is an obsolete relic of the frontier era.

Gun bashers say that the Second
Amendment has outlived its usefulness. They argue that pioneers needed
guns to fight Indians, redcoats and grizzly bears. But we don't face
such threats today. So why do we need guns?

In fact, the framers of the Constitution
were not greatly concerned about Indians, redcoats and grizzly bears.
But they worried deeply about the possibility that some future
government might strip the people of their rights. The best insurance
against this, they believed, was to make sure that the people were
armed.

"The supreme power
in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword," said Noah Webster,
"because the whole body of the people are armed..."

Guns will become superfluous to Americans
only when our lives and liberty no longer need defending. That time
does not appear to be coming soon.

Myth
#6 — We should treat guns the same way we treat cars, requiring
licenses for all users.

When
you apply for a firearms license, the government may or may not grant
it. And, having granted it, the government may later choose to revoke
it. What that means is that you never really had a right to bear arms,
in the first place. A right, by definition, cannot be withheld or
denied. As Thomas Jefferson put it, "I have a right to nothing, which
another has a right to take away."

Consider
the right to freedom of religion. Like all freedoms, religious liberty
creates problems. It allows murderous fanatics such as Jim Jones and
Marshall Applewhite to create killer cults like the Peoples' Temple and
Heaven's Gate.

A
government licensing program might prevent such tragedies. Anyone
starting a church could be subjected to psychiatric screening, his
beliefs and doctrines vetted by a board of experts. Cult killings would
likely diminish. But freedom of worship would be dead.

How about freedom of speech? Think of all
the pornography, hate speech and conspiracy theories that could be
eliminated by denying "speech licenses" to undesirable web geeks.
Hillary Clinton has actually proposed something along these lines.
Arguing that cyberspace is too free, she suggests that the Internet
needs an "editing or gate keeping function" to control its content.

But, aside from Hillary, most Americans
understand that requiring licenses for the exercise of basic
constitutional liberties is a bad idea.

There is no doubt that life is more orderly
in a police state. But our country was founded on the principle that
freedom takes precedence over order. As Thomas Jefferson put it, "I
would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much
liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it."

Anti-gun activists argue that reasonable
gun-control measures, such as waiting periods, one-gun-a-month limits,
trigger locks, "smart" technology and so on, do not threaten the rights
of legitimate gun owners.

But
this argument presumes that guns will only be used for sport. And,
indeed, most gun-control activists recognize no other legitimate use
for firearms. "To me, the only reason for guns in civilian hands is for
sporting purposes," says Sarah Brady, chairman and founder of Handgun
Control Inc.

Perhaps for
that reason, many gun-control measures now on the table seriously
impede the use of firearms for self-defense.

Take "smart" guns. They only work when the
user wears a special ring or wristband with a magnetic actuator or
radio transponder. Let's say you wake up in the dead of night. Your
husband is on a business trip, and there's a serial rapist standing in
your bedroom. This is not the time to be fumbling around in the dark,
undoing the trigger lock and trying to remember where your husband put
the transponder.

Waiting
periods can also be deadly. News reports show that many women have been
killed, because the Brady Law prevented them from obtaining guns
immediately, when they were threatened by stalkers.

As for one-gun-a-month rules, these prevent
people from stocking up quickly on arms during times of emergency. When
riots or natural disasters strike, looting and brigandage present a
real danger. People have a right, in such situations, to stockpile arms
for their families, neighbors and employees.

None of these arguments will persuade the
gun haters, of course. Their crusade is driven by ideology, not reason.

But fair-minded Americans
should seek out the facts. Our freedom was bought at too high a price
to let it slip away through ignorance and apathy.

Richard
Poe is a freelance journalist and a New York Times
bestselling author. His
latest book is WAVE 4 (Prima 1999). Visit his website at RichardPoe.com.